Best Twitter Practices In 2012 [Infographic]

I keep revisiting Twitter in my articles, and I just can’t help it. I think it is such an interesting platform to interact on, and even though Twitter is not an “instant” platform, it still has one of the fastest interaction turnarounds available. Some may disagree with me here, but if you consider the fact that you only have 300 API calls per hour (which includes sending tweets, receiving tweets, look ups, searches, retweets and everything else you can do on Twitter), you will quickly realize that it can’t be in real time. As a matter of fact, Twitter usually has an idle time of about 2-3 minutes on average before you can expect to receive someone’s tweet or retweet. So even though it’s not in real time, it is still one of the fastest social networking services available right now.

That makes your approach to it ever more important. You need to make sure you are making the most of each retweet, status update or tweet in order to make sure you progress with every used API call. It might sound a little weird talking about interaction in terms of API calls, but if you are heavy tweeters like we are at Bit Rebels, you will find that you run out of calls quite soon. Hopefully you have made the most of them. If you run out, you end up in what was previously called Twitter Jail while you wait for the current hour to run its course so that you can get back at it again.

I love great statistics, and I look them up on a daily basis. This keeps me informed about the trends that are about to spring up so we can quickly adjust to them. One such source was an infographic I recently found which brought me a well needed update on the state of people on Twitter. For example, it’s interesting to know that 53% of all Twitter users actually retweet. With a service that many people thought was winding down in popularity, this is certainly a refreshing injection of positive thinking. Maybe Twitter isn’t such a bad platform to build a following on after all.

This infographic called 5 1/2 Best Twitter Practices is brought to us by NJI Media and is what I call a fast update info sheet. Not only will it educate you on the basic yet powerful practices on Twitter during this year, but it will also allow you to feel more confident that your following is actually alive and well. Sure, after a while people seem to span their visits farther apart than they did before, but this is exactly what you need to rejuvenate your following by finding more interesting people to interact with and share tweets with. Twitter is alive and well, and this infographic should support that claim quite well. The question is, do you know where you are heading with your account? Do you know its purpose? In case you don’t, take a brief timeout and make sure you doodle up a plan for how to continue. Your following both deserves it and depends on it.